Commentary: Getting domain names

By BRIAN BOYER Columnist

Sunday

Jun 29, 2014 at 4:00 AM

Domain names are the key address for websites. They are pepsi.com, the-daily-record.com or osu.edu. They are the main calling card for your business and what people will need to remember to get to your site.

Choosing a domain name can be difficult. You want something that has your business name in it or is otherwise descriptive of your business. It also should be something short and memorable.

Avoid unusual spellings or unusual abbreviations. The more natural sounding, the better. However, domain names have to be unique. Globally, there is only one "pepsi.com."

Currently, there are millions and millions of domain names registered. The odds are your first choice may be taken. This is such an issue that when I founded my business, Web Pyro, we chose a domain name first and a business name second.

It is not uncommon to have multiple domain names. Many businesses will get variations (especially common misspellings) of their name. For example, "google.com" and "gooogle.com" will get you to the same place. Some will get the same name but with different extensions such as .com, .net and .org.

Once you have somewhat of an idea of what domain you want, reserve it as soon as possible. Even if you are not 100 percent set on the name, reserve it. I have seen occasions where one day a name will be available but the client asks to hold off just in case. The next week when they are ready to go, the name was bought by someone else.

Another reason to just go ahead and reserve the domain name is that domain names are cheap. You can reserve domain names from most places now for less than $25 a year. I normally reserve domain names at iPower (ipower.com).

No matter where you get them, price tends to depend on the top level domain or TLD. TLD is simply .com, .net or .org. Recently, all kinds of different TLDs were released, including .estate, .holdings, .zone and my favorite, .ninja. These tend to be more expensive (over $50 a year).

Reserving domain names is easy. If you don't want to use iPower, there are dozens of other sites that will reserve names for you.

These include: 1and1.com, networksolutions.com and hostgator.com. Or you can have the web developer that you are using to set up the site reserve one for you. Either way, it should be fairly straightforward.

There are cases where a domain name is reserved but you really would want it. It is possible you could still obtain that domain name, but it will take more effort. Many people will reserve a domain name and decide not to use it. They also may be in the business of selling domain names. The ownership of domain names is public by default (however, you can make that information private if you wish).

If you want to find out who owns a domain name or when ownership of a specific domain name expires, go to a website called whois.org. Here, you can type in the domain name and get that domain's public record. Network Solutions also has a nice directory at http://www.networksolutions.com/whois.

Overall, my recommendation is if you have an idea, get it sooner rather than later and keep it simple. Domain names are cheap, so getting multiple domain names shouldn't break the bank. Your perfect domain name might be taken, but don't settle for a long or clumsy name. Keep it short and memorable.

Brian Boyer is the managing partner of Web Pyro (http://www.webpyro.com) located in Wooster.

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